The Mexican director cut his teeth on the low-budget horror flick,
The Devil’s Backbone,
before adding some serious bite to Blade
2, and now finally gets to unleash hell (literally) for this
latest incarnation.

Kicking off in 1944, the film opens with the type of prologue
that could have been lifted straight from the Indiana Jones escapade,
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Nazi leaders, desperate to turn the course of the war in their
favour, attempt to open the gates of hell, under the mad leadership
of Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) and his evil henchman, Kroenen,
only to be thwarted by Allied Forces.

In the ensuing battle, a small demon-child is discovered, hiding
amid some gravestones, and is immediately adopted by the rescue
team.

Hellboy, as he is christened, is
subsequently put to work under the guidance of the paternal Professor
Broom (John Hurt), founder of the clandestine Bureau for Paranormal
Research and Defence (BPRD), who informs newcomers that ‘there
are things out there that go bump in the night, and we’re
the ones who bump back’.

Together with fellow ‘bumpers’, including Rupert
Evans’ fresh-faced FBI recruit, John Myers, Selma Blair’s
pyro-kinetic Liz Sherman (who holds the key to Hellboy’s
heart), and Doug Jones’ telepathic ‘Mer-Man, Abe Sapien,
who owes a lot of his demeanour to Star
Wars’ C3P0, they set about ridding the world of evil.

But they have their work cut out by the return of Rasputin and
his cronies (including the critter-like, multi-tentacled Sammael),
who seem intent on reclaiming Hellboy as part of their plan to
bring about Armageddon.

At its core, del Toro’s movie could read like any other
comic book saga, given the underlying theme of good versus evil,
and men who don’t fit in.

Yet, it rises above the mundane by the sheer bravado it displays,
in all aspects of its production.

The film looks fantastic, and contains plenty of set pieces,
yet it never loses sight of the characterisation, placing it in
the Spider-Man school of big budget film-making, rather than the
flimsy, computer-game orientated style of Van Helsing.

Some of the special effects feel a little too CGI-heavy, but
del Toro, wisely, never allows them to swamp proceedings, and
most of the confrontations are enlivened considerably by Perlman’s
ability to deliver a telling one-liner at the end of them.

And therein lies another of the movie’s strengths - the
charismatic central performance of its under-used lead actor.

Perlman fits the bill perfectly, exhibiting just the right amount
of super-hero ‘cool’ mixed with a vulnerability born
out of his frustrated love for Sherman.

Not everything hits, of course, and the film does eventually
feel longer than it should, but del Toro’s eye for the obscure
is such that you can forgive it for most of its excesses - even
if the 12A rating seems a little generous given some of the violence.